I've seen the future and it will be...

A battle between the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Before I explain
what I mean, I will be the first to admit that all this is rather
pretentious. Attempting to predict the future of a complex dynamic
system is, by definition, impossible. However, I believe that we can
influence the direction the system evolves and I hope that what I
write becomes more of a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than anything
else. With that disclaimer, let's move on:

A couple of years ago, Eric S. Raymond wrote an article titled
The
Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was not about music, but about
software; how the "Bazaar" model (i.e., thousands of developers spread
over the Internet writing software because of inherent factors, such
as love for solving problems and/or coolness) is superior to a
"Cathedral" model (where a small group of developers control the
development of a piece of software). Raymond likens the development
model of Linux, the one computer
operating system to emerge as a credible threat to Microsoft's monopoly, to a Bazaar,
and the Free Software Foundation's
major efforts (and other commercial developments, including Microsoft) to building Cathedrals.
I think this analogy is erroneous because the Free Software Foundation is as integral
a part of the bazaar as the Linux
development "team". The crux of Raymond's points lies not in whether
the Cathedral or the Bazaar model is the better choice, but how the
Bazaar model is in accordance with the theory of complex adaptive
systems, and how, this approach, in general, is a long-term model for
tremendous progress in terms of innovation and creativity.

There exists a similar analogy in spirit with regards to music,
but different in practice because the "goal" of music is not
utility. I have chosen to use Raymond's terms but have modified their
definitions slightly to adjust for the differences in the two
endeavours. The trackers, the home recorders, and the MP3ers are all
part of the Bazaar. The major
distributors and the distribution mechanisms comprise the
Cathedral, siphoning the creative worth of musicians for monetary
profit while remaining distant and unreachable from the creative and
consumer bases. Today, like with software, thousands of musicians are
creating and distributing music over the Internet, primarily because
of inherent reasons, such as a love for music or creative ego, rather
than any intention of making profit. As a result, a lot of this music
is freely copied and distributed, and forms a key component of the
Bazaar model. Creativity in the Bazaar occurs in a bottom-up
environment (there are no restrictions; it doesn't even have to
"work") as opposed to a top-down environment in the Cathedral (the
major labels impose "rules" such as "has to sell well" on any creative
output).

So why should this bottom-up creation and distribution model work?
It works because the individual agents in the system (artists,
listeners, distributors) are not constrained by top-down rules, i.e.,
they have freedom. The freedoms are diverse and not necessarily
explicit, including the freedom from commercial interests and the
freedoms to modify, stand on the shoulders of giants, and improve.
This diverse set of freedoms enables a work under scrutiny to evolve,
following a non-deterministic exponential trajectory, i.e., in a chaotic
manner. This results in an immense amount of creativity: not only
is a given work built upon which it is built upon which it is built
... but this development also occurs in parallel and each time the
output is different (it deviates from another trajectory or path
exponentially)!

In other words, if someone distributes a song to many people, then
it is likely that more than one person will use it as a starting point
for a new-derivative work. Each of the people who create these works
will do something very different (given the subjective nature of
music) and distribute these modified works. Now more people are going
to have access to this work which they will use as a starting base and
the cycle will go on. The time evolution of the work follows a
"non-linear" path or trajectory, and the differences (however you
measure it) between any two paths grows exponentially over time. The
non-linearity in the system results in non-determinism: each time this
song creation process is repeated, what will happen will be extremely
different from what happened before (thus the increased amount of
total creativity). It is almost as if the work has a life of its own
(the term for this is "emergence"). This evolution of this emergence
has tremendous implications for issues regarding creativity,
intellectual property, and censorship in music, and, ultimately, the
future of the Cathedral.

mp3.com and free-music.com are two examples
of sites that enable distribution of Free Music (Free Music Archives
or FMAs). In terms of volume of copies distributed, normalising for
the relative obscurity of most artists, these sites are doing
phenomenally compared to the distribution achieved via normal
channels. I am an artist who distributes music through both these
FMAs and my own site (twisted-helices.com),
without any intellectual property restrictions whatsoever. I receive
e-mail from total strangers who've incorporated music or sounds I've
created. I also use ideas, notes, chords, and sounds that arise from
people I know who use what arise from my mind and so on. It has
gotten to a point where I've stopped keeping track of who's doing
what, but just go on creating. Cogently, I realise that I am creating
by standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the
shoulders of giants--it's like the
mythical idea of an infinite number of tortoises, one below the other,
supporting the earth. The bottom line here is that there's a
complex web of unconstrained creativity based around our creations
which is spreading in an exponential manner as a result of Free Music.

Compare what happens in the major label Cathedral to what happens
in a FMA Bazaar. The Cathedral essentially dictates what gets played
on the marketplace. Mainstream publicity channels such as MTV and
commercial radio are part of the Cathedral. Every creative
work that comes out bearing the major label mark has gone through a
bureaucratic approval process in the Cathedral, having been deemed to
fulfill certain requirements for propriety, profitability, and
controllability. It's debatable whether the artistic content of these
works are even an issue.

I assert that the Cathedral is dying, and the reasons it will die
are as follows: (i) Top-down systems cannot adapt as quickly as
bottom-up systems. In the digital world, composition and compression
technology changes rapidly. If a new format emerges tomorrow, mp3.com is more suited to become mp4.com
before a company like Warner Bros. even realises what's
happening. (ii) Niche markets in music will be the norm as
opposed to being the exception. A large monolithic major label
structure is not flexible enough to afford to exploit the small niche
markets, whereas the FMAs can cater to every individual's taste. This
isn't just because of the Internet, but because of the worry-free
manner music is available on an FMA. (iii) Creativity is
exponentially and non-deterministically enriched in the Bazaar. (More
on this below.) (iv) Intellectual property controls are in
direct conflict with points (i)-(iii). This has been
argued cogently, in spirit at least, in John Perry Barlow's The Economy of Ideas and
Raymond's The
Cathedral and the Bazaar. The salient points are that
worrying about intellectual property slows down reaction time as one
is questioning how controllable a new technological format is, as the
RIAA is currently doing with its
actions (i); the potential profit margins in niche markets
does not make it worth the worry price, generally what you pay the
lawyers (ii); and the Bazaar, which enriches creativity in a
radical manner, does so only at a risk of not maximising profit
(iii).

The Cathedral will lose in competition to the Bazaar for all the
cases in (i)-(iv) and Darwinian
selection will see to it that the majors go the way of the
dinosaurs. Again, I will stress that the bottom-up work model works
only so long as the Bazaar remains a bazaar, i.e., the freedoms I
speak of above exist (in practice at least). Also, it's possible that
Cathedrals today will also adopt the Bazaar model and find other means
of generating revenue besides basing it on the control of the spread
of creativity.

One can argue that sites like mp3.com or free-music.com are attractive
because you're getting something without paying for it. But what you
also get when you download a song is total freedom to do with the song
as you please (at least for personal use, or until no one finds out),
even though this isn't necessarily what the intended effect might be.
Generally people who endorse a paradigm like the Free Music
Philosophy understand the distinction between getting music for
free and being able to copy music freely, i.e., without intellectual
property restrictions.

But what is the fundamental reality? Why are the RIAA and the major
distributors afraid of the prolific spread of digital audio?
Sure, it threatens their oligopoly, but not just because the Internet
has somehow made music more accessible to the masses, but rather
because the distribution of music on the Internet follows a non-linear
exponential trajectory without control. The fact of the matter is
that more and more people are completely apathetic to the intellectual
property concerns when downloading or even distributing music online.
And they can't afford to be anything but. This scares most people
because they cannot control what has happened with their creative
output, and it's even more terrifying when the control of creative
output is fundamentally linked to economic input. Lack of control on
the part of the recording industry means more freedom for the
musicians and the listeners. My main thesis here is that it is this
freedom that is the key to making the Bazaar model work.

The freedoms I speak of above has the greatest impact on people
who create or wish to create music. A few years ago, when I started
getting into making recordings, musicians were looking at analog
4-tracks and 8-tracks and saying, hey, we can now produce great
sounding albums without spending a lot of money. Today, with digital
recording in place, musicians can now produce recordings that sound as
good or better than a major label record in their basements. And the
digital world has become the great equaliser: musicians can also
distribute this music widely, probably better than what a
major label would do for the average musician.

This ease of distribution is what makes music free, not how much
it costs for the download (it costs someone somewhere something to
download an MP3). Music is free because you can let your friend hear
it, copy it, play it to their friends, and so on. In a more extreme
situation, music is completely free when another musician can use your
creation as a starting point for their own creation. This is when Free
Music is at its most valuable. And without this freedom, human
creativity will not likely be seen at its most awesome potential.

From a creative perspective, where I see all this going is that
music becomes like language. Just as no one owns the English language,
no one will own what music will become. The reason no one can own the
English language is because of the number of people that have
contributed to it, molded it, and made it grow and adapt--it's either
owned by everyone or no one at all. It's a continuous and complex
dynamic system, evolving in a non-linear manner, and growing from the
previous changes created by feedback loops. The same will apply to
music in the future: a song you write may involve so many
contributions and meta-contributions that to claim exclusive rights to
it would be a joke. Like a language, music will be a collage of ideas,
notes, chords, and sounds from many many different creative minds. The
term "collage music" already exists to describe such
a phenomenon, pioneered, in part, by the views of artists like Negativeland and John
Oswald and embraced by genres like techno. Music will be the
communication that begins where conventional language ends.

There is a large proliferation of hard disk multitrack recorders
in the music scene today. Consider a scenario where you can not only
make your songs available mixed down in MP3 format, but also each of
the tracks in MP3 format such that software and hardware-based MP3
players can handle data track by track. Imagine the possibilities:
Don't like a guitar solo in the middle of the track? Edit it out, or
record your own solo! Want to change the drum kit in the drum track?
Given the sound to MIDI converters, this will be doable in real-time,
so you can assign drum patches to a real drummer. Even the smallest
tweak in the mix may result in a new song for the person listening it.
Of course, most audiences will listen to what they're fed, but I argue
a greater number of people (the audiophiles at least; people who don't
play instruments but are picky about sound) will start "fine tuning"
songs to suit their own tastes, much the way people adjust brightness
and contrast and colour on TV sets. You can have multiple options for
a given track and have it randomly played so the song changes
everytime you listen to it!

We're only a few steps away from this becoming a reality:
multitrack MP3 manipulators are technologically and economically
feasible. MIDI already permits this sort of manipulation at the
composition level, but unfortunately, there is no format that merges
MIDI and sound elegantly. While I believe in compartmentalisation and
think the different protocols are suited for the different things they
do, it's not inconceivable to imagine a end-user software or hardware
machine that takes any combination of MIDI/MP3 (or any arbitrary
composition and compression format) and permit track by track
manipulation. In fact, even though the process isn't entirely
straightforward, many musicians (including myself) have collaborated
with others over the Internet by exchanging multitrack soundfiles,
tapes and MIDI files, and even interactively, without ever
meeting.

The Bazaar model will enable creative endeavours between musicians
who have the time and the inclination to pursue a full-time career
and those who do not wish to dedicate their life to music exclusively.
The latter is generally a requirement for working as part of the
Cathedral. Some musicians want to create and then not have to tour,
some might not want to promote as actively, and some may just prefer
to remain anonymous. All of these musicians will have an excellent
opportunity to be heard.

Another method by which I think creative cross-fertilisation will
occur is by coupling appreciation of musicians (i.e., payment) with
creativity. For example, in one of the FMAs, if the artists get a
percentage of advertising revenues based on song downloads, then
rather than just having the option of receiving actual cash, they may
also receive hard copies of music by other bands. This way, an
incestuous relationship between the artists will be developed. Given a
large population of musicians, which will grow if the above
multitrack models are implemented, this will result in a
self-sustaining complex system with unimaginable creative dynamic.
We're all musicians as well as listeners. The potential for breeding
creativity is even greater if other creative ventures such as
software, visual art, and literary art are coupled with music.

Musicians currently make money through a variety of sources: sales of
records, merchandise and concert tickets, and royalties from
commercial airplay. Freeing music will certainly not be detrimental
to the sales of merchandise and concert tickets, nor will it affect
compulsory or performance royalties. If anything, it will
improve sales since people will continue supporting artists
they like by going to their concerts and buying their
merchandise. Profits from record sales will also not be affected
because people will be encouraged to buy directly from the artist for
the added bonuses of liner notes, lyrics sheets, and packaging. Thus
Free Music can be used as a marketing tool to ensure that musicians do
not starve. An approach where people send the artist a "donation", if
they found value in the music they copied, is another way to make
money in a direct fashion. This could become an ingrained practice in
society, like tipping, where even though there is no enforced
requirement to tip for various services, people do anyway.

As the Bazaar model follows its complex trajectory, the economic
solutions will automatically arise in a complementary manner.
Commerce abhors a vacuum.

Imagine a complex adaptive web, where a musician records a song
and distributes it with all the tracks. A listener adds reverb and
echo to parts of certain tracks which is further distributed to other
musicians and they sample or use parts of the modified track. Perhaps
the original musician is fed back these modifications and creates a
new variation which is further distributed. And so on. Imagine the
richness of music that will result. That is the future. It's already
happening.